Better Color with PantoneLIVE

Pantone Senior Vice President Ron Potesky and Cary Sherburne confer about the newly announced PantoneLIVE

Cary Sherburne: Hi. I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Ron Potesky who is Senior Vice President and General Manager at Pantone. Welcome.

Ron Potesky: Thank you very much. Welcome to you. Happy to have you visit Pantone.

Cary Sherburne: And I’m happy to be here. You guys have a pretty exciting announcement. Maybe you could share a little bit with us about PantoneLIVE.

Ron Potesky: Sure, sure. Well, everybody, of course, knows that Pantone is the ubiquitous color communication standard for designers everywhere, and package printing is one of our core markets. And, of course, brand owners are using Pantone to identify new brand designs. But a problem is that Pantone, of course, is great if you’re printing offset on a certain kind of paper, but once you move to Flexo, once you move to Gravure, once you’re printing on different substrates, it’s not so easy to always capture that Pantone color perfectly.

So PantoneLIVE, which is part of our new Pantone Digital Business Unit, will allow brand owners and everybody in the supply chain to use real digital values from a Cloud application to get real color on real substrates no matter what you’re printing on. Of course, it starts though with the Pantone standard and that would be PMS Plus Standard. It starts with our coded offset standard, but then we use dependent standards on different substrates and different processes.

Cary Sherburne: So in other words, if I’m the designer that’s beginning to work with the brand owner on a new product, I can specify the color from the beginning and that same technical specification is going to follow that color throughout the lifecycle.

Ron Potesky: Through the lifecycle. So we have brand owner, as an example, and this is where I really realized PantoneLIVE was the right solution. Brand owner, large brand owner said we take our Pantone color and then ultimately we’re going to, let’s say plastic packaging of some sort, and we translate that into our own library, and then that pushes down the supply chain. And everybody’s confused everywhere in the process what is the real color? What we want is to be able to use Pantone from the design phase through the supply chain and that’ll make it easier for everybody. So PantoneLIVE allows them to do that.

Cary Sherburne: And then the other thing would be shortening of cycle times because you’re not going back and forth with—once people gain trust in the system…

Ron Potesky: Absolutely.

Cary Sherburne: You’re not going back and forth with all the proofs and the courier charges and the mockups.

Ron Potesky: You’re going to get better color faster and cheaper because you’re going to cut down cycle times, you’re going to cut down waste, you’re going to get off press faster. Everybody in the supply chain actually benefits.

Cary Sherburne: And I understand that you’re signing up some partners to help you work through this, and one of your first partners was Esco?

Ron Potesky: That’s right. We’ve got Esco is a key partner for us for prepress and package print. This is essential. We also have ink partners. SunChemical is a preferred ink partner for ink. So we’ve got some key players in the supply chain who we needed to be part of this from the beginning and it’ll deliver just tremendous value for our customers.

Cary Sherburne: Well, that’s great. And the launch is—yeah, I guess you’d call it the launch—the launch went great and I’m sure that people will be anxious to see this available. When will we see market availability?

Ron Potesky: Well, of course, if you come to Drupa you’re going to see a ton about PantoneLIVE at Drupa. And we should be delivering product in Q2. So we’ve got Drupa will be the real kind of practical launch, and then we’ll be delivering thereafter. We’re already working, by the way, with brand owners today and delivering. So this is really a process that’s begun and we’ll be delivering new functions and features over the next months.

Cary Sherburne: And people can visit pantone.com for more information?

Ron Potesky: They can visit pantone.com for more information. They can also, of course, visit xrite.com for more information. And this is really the blending of the Pantone communication language and brand, and X-Rite’s technology, and this is kind of this symbiotic relationship between the two companies. And that’s why X-Rite bought Pantone once upon a time.

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